Careerist Parents, Freaky Children
Wolf, Arnold Jacob
Careerist Parents, Freaky Children Arnold Jacob Wolf liberal parents radical children by midge decter. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc. 1975. $7.95 The vivid portraits of the young...
...This, therefore, is a book about galut, about the final surrender of some Jewish persons to their environment, about the victims of America's blandishments and her violence, about Jewish families in disarray and disaster...
...If the hard-working intellectual whose alienated labor is, in his own deepest evaluation, trivial, raises a child whose life is manifestly self-trivialized, is that any wonder...
...He writes on contemporary Jewish affairs for MOMENT and other magazines...
...Parents stop praying and studying Torah...
...But it is one possible — and available — alternative, and we had better not forget it...
...In what sense were the parents "liberal...
...Money is drek, possessions a drag, and denial of his desires rare, mostly because the latter were so modest...
...She moved in with other like-minded "heads," while her parents "waved good-bye at the curb...
...Decter are around: if not on campus or in politics, then in the interstices of large American cities and even villages...
...Trained to be acquiescent and nonviolent, generous and sharing, he never learns to deal with his ego-needs or evil inclinations...
...7.95 The vivid portraits of the young which Midge Decter draws in her new book are imperfectly nuanced, but they are neither factitious nor extravagant...
...The parents try to find happiness in the suburbs, living like goyim in their isolated split-level fortresses...
...Finally he chucked it all for California, with the terrified blessings of his failed parents...
...The college student of today is much more like his predecessor of the Eisenhower years than like the people described in this book...
...We want our children to get into Princeton, knowing that when they graduate, they will no longer be our children...
...He felt manipulated and misused...
...The world, it seems, is no commune...
...Without Law, there is no sin...
...Considering his father's contemporaries mere wage- and duty-slaves, he could find no emancipating place for himself, nor any task worth surrendering a jot of his own self to...
...And in what sense are their children "radical...
...He sought a "revolution backward into being," but found ©nly shabby settings for his Utopian expectations...
...the biographies are biographies of Jews manque...
...we reap confusion and paralysis...
...The generation of "radicals" born, say, between 1945 and 1952, is a distinct type, already, fortunately or not, almost utterly extinct...
...It refused to be bored, and therefore could not be educated...
...Because that is, unhappily, precisely what they are...
...Midge Decter thinks they are in very bad shape...
...Its clothes were dress-up costumes cast off by parents, and its demeanor that of badly neglected little children...
...care and child care, in meditation and modest good works...
...He could not, or would not, do the work his college expected, nor could he find anything else worth doing...
...Receiving adulation instead of love, she was equipped only for pneumatic sex, and came to live for it...
...Tt is finally the fault of their parents, who loved them not wisely but too well, and of their professors, who simply sucked up to them...
...Fate become deity: thus the choice between work and nonwork, between law school and basket-weaving, between orgiastic sex and ascetic continence is a choice between meaninglessness and mean-inglessness...
...Parents move toward one kind of assimilation: careerist, upwardly mobile, child-centered...
...It came in with the putative greening and went out with the undeniable wintering of America, and it has no successors...
...Unpressured and adulated when young, she grew toward an insatiable need for reassurance and gratification...
...the children succeed...
...The Communard is the most interesting and saddest example of all...
...Still, the "young" described by Ms...
...For the point about these "professional, enlightened, liberal, middle class" families is that they are Jews...
...without sin, no atonement, no accounting, only superficial regret...
...her causeless discontent was enough to get the otherwise satisfactory cleaning lady fired...
...We broadcast all kinds of bottomless, schizoid uncertainty...
...The Dropout, raised with all the supposed advantages and none of the feared demands, ended up weak and spineless...
...He came to believe that all persons should have equal access to the world's goods and that equality could be achieved without struggle...
...They did rear their children with an uncommon permissiveness and attentive-ness, but this for reasons quite different from their supposed "liberalism," in my opinion...
...She refused to do anything, insisting that simply to be (comfortable) was all that life was about...
...Some say that we have lost a whole generation of them, others that their only sin was to be prematurely messianic...
...He successfully proletarianized himself, but could find no place to be a neo-prole...
...On the contrary, these young people (unlike many others of their generation) seem very much like their own parents: smug, inward, comfort-seeking...
...The Pothead was a lovely girl baby who grew into an obnoxious young woman...
...If a successful corporation lawyer remembers anything, believes anything, regrets anything, he may well be secretly moved by quasi-revolutionary or even nihilistic reservations...
...They voted for Democrats and may have felt cordial to Martin Luther King, but they hardly seem very much Left of most other Americans...
...Their methods are, indeed, somewhat different, but they, too, are proponents of "making it," taking their parents' long journey from the Lower East Side one giant — and logical — step farther...
...You can also see them in counter-cultural, anti-institutional organizations, working for health Arnold Jacob Wolf is Jewish Chaplain and Director of Hillel at Yale University...
...It is the (admittedly fragile) conceptual framework of Decter's book that truly disappoints...
...We want to be accepted, and we despise those who do the accepting and the rejecting...
...He could not bring himself to dissect a frog, much less to fight in Viet Nam...
...Some critics have found these portraits overdrawn...
...Their offspring move beyond them to a fuller kind of acculturation: becoming proletarians, freak-outs, sullen and final dropouts from all commandment and obligation...
...We want our children to fulfill our dreams, but we often distort those dreams, even to ourselves...
...We want to be successful, and we want to be happy...
...The children of "America's professional, or enlightened, liberal middle class" have been unable, by and large, to take their "rightful place in the world," to replace or recapitulate their parents' work and life...
...Decter never says so, though she identifies herself with them...
...And the chapter in history described here is therefore a chapter in Jewish history...
...Her narcissism (it is a word for each of the four "cases") began in infancy...
...You can find them farming in Vermont or playing the guitar in Old Town, watching the Haight collapse around them, and freaking out in hospitals all over the country...
...Decter would have helped us more if she had told us that her young people were, indeed, Jews in extremis...
...A generation was significantly unchallenged, such that any intractable task came to be seen as illegitimate, and it began to drop out of them all...
...Losing one's virginity in high school, getting high on cough syrup, disliking physical violence — these hardly merit an extremist epithet...
...it refused to be "hassled" and so could not form coherent task forces of any kind...
...The Sexual Revolutionist went from promiscuity to chastity without ever touching the intermediate bases...
...We live in America for three or four generations and feel more alien than our greenhorn grandparents...
...Feeling exploited by her partners (though she did most of the seducing), there was no place for her to end up but Women's Liberation with a strong element of lesbianism...
...And if the psychoanalysts are correct, children respond not to their parents' conscious choices (egos), but rather to their parents' subconscious values and their struggles (superegos...
...While the book explains very little, it does describe with both accuracy and candor a piece of fading landscape...
...Collapse is not the only alternative to Jewish commitment these days...
...But clearly, that is the unspoken though scarcely hidden assumption of the story...
...No wonder she almost OD'd on cough syrup and spent much of her adolescence collecting highs...
...The parents tried not to be Jews...
...He could survive only in a commune but could never find one communard selfless enough to meet his standards, or resolute enough to survive the world's affronts...
...Decter gives us portraits of four such "radical children...
...Fading" because this book is not about the present generation, as generations are" now counted...
...We want our children to surpass us, but we may try to kill them if they do...
...Or overdetermine them...
...their children stop all talk, all study...
...The only way to one-up parents like theirs is to be children like them...
...The children try to find happiness like even more goyish goyim, living in silent communes or shacked up in slums...
...But they ring true enough to me, and if one savors horror stories, more gruesome ones could easily be provided...
...At least her mother has a grudging sympathy for her final "freedom," one not shared by our notoriously unlib-erated authoress...
Vol. 1 • December 1975 • No. 5
